COURT BACKS POLICE SEARCHES OF PASSENGERS IN CARS

Supreme Court Extends Search Power Of Officers Beyond Vehicle And Driver

WASHINGTON -- A police officer who stops a car and has reason to suspect it
contains illegal drugs or guns may search everything in the vehicle,
including a passenger's purse, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. The 6-3
decision continues the trend of giving police greater authority to search
motorists and their cars.

For decades, the court has said that once people leave home and go onto the
highways, they have a diminished right to privacy. To maintain safety on the
roads, police have nearly unchecked power to stop and question motorists,
the court has said.

But the scope of police power to search inside a stopped car has been fought
out in a series of cases during the past 20 years.

The officer needs something beyond a mere traffic violation to justify a
full-fledged search of the car, the court has said.

If, for example, the motorist appears to be drunk or on drugs, or is
believed to be carrying a concealed weapon, the officer can search "every
part of the vehicle and its contents," the court has said in the past.

Until Monday, however, it had been unclear whether this power to search
extended to the personal belongings of a presumably innocent passenger.

The issue came before the court when state judges in Wyoming threw out the
drug evidence found in the purse of a passenger in a car driven by a man who
had a syringe sticking out of his front pocket.

This search violated the Fourth Amendment, the Wyoming Supreme Court said,
because police had no reason to suspect the passenger of wrongdoing.

Reversing that decision, the Supreme Court swept aside the distinction
between motorists and their passengers.

"We hold that police officers with probable cause to search a car may
inspect passengers' belongings found in the car that are capable of
concealing the object of the search," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for the
court.

It would be confusing for the police and for local judges, Scalia said, if a
national rule were set that allowed searches of some containers in cars, but
not others, depending on who claimed them.

"One would expect passenger-confederates to claim everything as their own,"
he said, prompting a "bog of litigation" to resolve whether the officers
acted correctly.

Legal experts who have tracked the court's cases on car searches said the
ruling was more of a clarification than a bold departure.

"This is not so much new as it is more of the same," said Boston University
law professor Tracey Maclin. "All these decisions basically say that once
you get in your car, you are fair game. It is significant, though, because
it affects potentially millions of people."

Defense lawyers said they were outraged.

"We're becoming a police state," said Denver attorney Larry Pozner,
president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "This
ruling tells the police that when they pull over a car to investigate a
driver, they can search any one of us in the vehicle for any reason or no
reason whatsoever."

But Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police
Organizations, praised the court "for giving officers the tools they need to
do their jobs. Officers must be free of unreasonable, confusing and
unworkable restrictions on what may be searched," he said.